As promised, my next blog post would be about the "Spooky" jam recording I made many years ago. Here it is on YouTube:
Just like the previous post's recording, I don't have an exact recording date for this but I can certify that it's sometime from 1996-1999 because during that time I was still using an analog 4-track machine. Sometime around 1999-2001 is when I acquired my first digital recorder which was a Boss BR-8 and recorded on Zip disks. Remember those? Anyway, it may be closer to 2001 as that is that date of the recording of my very own first original song, "Autumn."
But as it is, "Spooky Jam" was a tape recording. I said before that this Tascam 4 track machine had absolutely no built-in effects. The sound came out dry unless you added effects to your input signal. So the reverb you may hear on this recording was my experimentation of playing the song on the Tascam into the input of the Boss BR-8. That way I was able to add reverb and, unintentionally, some compression as well.
This recording was a much slower version of the previous "Spooky" and the instrumentation was sparse. There's an electric guitar doing various things, a bass, a harmonica here and there and my homemade drums. I still am not sure whether it's my guitar doing the bass or if it was a real bass, though I am leaning towards an actual bass. If it is a bass that would date that song at December 1998 and beyond. Again, knowing the recording date would solve the mystery.
There's only one guitar track which plays rhythm first and then some solo parts. The drum part is actually double-tracked past the mid-point of the song--one track on the left and one on the right. I really loved experimenting with panning the sounds. At first I was playing the drums like bongos and then changed to playing with sticks which at that time were just some Sharpie-type markers which no longer served as writing utensils.
I wasn't really good at improvising with guitar playing at that time. Otherwise there wouldn't have been so much dead air time on the guitar track. And the harmonica? Yeah, I couldn't play that either. The bass was a repetitive line so the drums were probably at the forefront of this recording. I should add that during the time of these early archive recordings of mine, I didn't have a metronome. So there are lots of out-of-sync sounds at any given moment. That's also why the recording fades in at the beginning and fades out at the end. I tried to preserve the best portion of the impromptu jam.
That's about it for the history on this recording. I think it sounds better with the reverb. I always felt there was something missing on my recordings even after acquiring the capability to record on 4 tracks. I used to think once I had a real piano sound that would take care of it. But it wasn't. It wasn't having real drums either. It was not having reverb and delay and compression. My music didn't come alive until I had access to the built-in effects of the Boss BR-8.
Now that I have reestablished a presence on YouTube--who am I kidding? I have nowhere near the views on my videos that I had before. At the time I uploaded some of my cover videos in 2009 and the early 2010s, some of them were actual firsts. I had the first correct "Barney Miller" theme bass cover. The first bass cover for "Skin Tight" by The Ohio Players. I had a really innovative cover for Paul McCartney's "Heart of the Country" that came up first in Google searches. I had many others as well. All gone. And even though I have re-uploaded all those videos they have gone nowhere and are pretty much dead. Other YouTubers have taken my place in search engines with their covers of the same songs. So even though I may have a presence on YouTube once again you'll need a microscope to find my material.
Regardless, it's more important to me to have my videos up on YouTube than to have the views. At least with them being on that site they're "out there" even if virtually impossible to find. And of course there's always that element of 'you never know what's going to happen." It may be discovered some day.
But anyway, this post is going to be about one of the videos I recently uploaded there. One of my all-time favorite songs is "Spooky" by Dennis Yost & The Classics IV. Even before I had real musical instruments--not counting the Casio PT-10--I made a pretty bad version of the song multi-tracked with cheap mics onto even cheaper cassette tapes. Yes, it was my rubber band and coffee can days. Extremely lo-fi. And as bad as it was I still plan to upload it to YouTube someday and link to it here.
As time went on and my lot of gear improved over the years, I decided to redo "Spooky" and this time with a vocal even. Too bad for me I didn't keep logs of when I did my recordings so I only have my hazy memory to go by. One thing is for sure: I got my first electric guitar in 1996 which came about 4 years after my very first guitar, a Harmony folk-style acoustic guitar. It had a noticeably smaller body than a dreadnought. Looked kind of like a classical with steel strings.
So the first electric guitar came in 1996 and it was an Epiphone Les Paul Special II purchased from Guitar Center. But I only purchased the guitar. What's an electric guitar without an amp, you say? Well, to me it was a lot. I had a 4 track Tascam analog tape machine at that time and I knew I could record directly into it sans an amp. To be perfectly honest I neither had nor wanted an amp at that time. A lot of that had to do with my own naivete in terms of what an amp could do for my sound, though.
But I was able to get clean tones and distorted ones as well. It was just a matter of adjusting the volume on the guitar and the input volume on the Tascam. So I thought I had everything I needed.
When I got my electric guitar I not only used it for guitar parts on my recordings but also for the bass parts. I would tune down the lowest 2 or 3 strings and it would sound sufficiently bassy. I'm not sure if that's what I did on my version of "Spooky" because I am not clear on the recording date. I didn't get my first electric bass until December 1998 so if this recording was made before then, I used my guitar for bass. Anyway, there are 3 guitar parts and the 1 bass part. The other instruments you hear are my drums (coffee & candy cans) and a tambourine and some seed pods.
To me the best part of the song is the electric guitar solo with delay. I learned the sax solo and played it on guitar. All these years later I still really like that solo. And I didn't use a pedal for that delay effect. I had to do it the way they did it in professional studios back in the day. I don't recall my exact method but the gist of it was to have a 2nd copy of the solo recorded a little quieter and lagging a small bit behind the first. Done with tape of course. I didn't sit there and play the solo a second time and record it. It was just the magic of tape.
Also, I recorded this song before the internet became a ubiquitous thing. So I couldn't go online and look up tabs for songs and get the right or close-to-right chords. I had to figure it all out myself. And I know some of those chords I played were indeed wrong because when I first did see the chords for this song they were very different from the simple ones I played. So those guys who were putting the chords and tabs out there on Harmony Central were truly pioneers and I learned a lot from them.
Finally, I decided to add a vocal to my recording. I know it's a bad one. Out of tune and pitchy. And in my natural speaking voice. It sucks. But I love the reverb on it!
My Tascam recorder had no built-in effects. Absolutely nothing. Once I purchased my first guitar effects pedal, a Korg ToneWorks 411fx, I finally had effects! But I didn't know how to use the blasted thing because it came with no manual. You see, I bought the floor model which was the only one available at Guitar Center and those models never come with their boxes or manuals or anything else. But I am grateful to the young guy who sold that one to me. I don't know what he is doing nowadays but I hope he is happy and well.
At this point I can't even tell you how I got the reverb on the vocal. Did I plug a microphone or something into the Korg ToneWorks and sing my heart away? Or was the reverb added to the dry vocal recording later? I'm not sure but the reverb was beautiful. I couldn't always tune in that reverb however. Not having the manual I couldn't always find it. I would mindlessly turn the rotary knobs until it appeared. I know it had other sounds and things but I only cared for the reverb.
And that's the story of that recording. Funny thing is, I no longer have that guitar or that bass (if I used a bass, that is) or that effects pedal. I don't regret not having the 2 instruments but I sure wish I had that pedal still. I think I know a little more about using it now. And they're going for over $100 on eBay these days.
As recently as 2019 I took that recording without the bad vocal and did a new vocal. It came out better but not without its own unique flaws. Now that I know the correct chords to play I just may do a new version or 2 of it. I'd like to do a version as close to the original as possible and perhaps a rendition featuring my own unique take on it. It's a song I never tire of. In fact, my next post will be about sort of a "Spooky" jam recording I created around the same time. Stay tuned!
What have I been up to lately? Well, revisiting some of my old tunes and re-working them so to speak. Last week I went back to "Another Morning (What a Drag)" and attempted to create a stripped-down mix of it for a special purpose. Recently the thought of going back to many of my older songs and just completely stripping them down to acoustic guitar and vocals has crossed my mind. I guess I feel like experimenting a bit. But even something like that can distract me from getting my album released as part of my springtime goal. So in reality the reason I went back to "Another Morning" was for a very good reason and not just to kill time. Anyway, here is the mix that I came up with.
The last few days I have gone back to working on "Tomorrow." A music comrade had suggested I do a little more with the vocals so I added some extra layers of complimentary vocals. It was a great idea that I'm glad he suggested and I really like how the new version now sounds. I also took the liberty of moving around a few parts that for years I have left alone; reason being that I felt I had spent enough time on it already and needed to move on. So this new yet-unreleased version will sound different from the one I released on my EP in late 2011 which can be heard on Spotify if you look hard enough (or on my YouTube channel).
It was interesting going back to these recordings from 2009 and 2010. I realized I was quite reverb-happy during that time. I still love reverb but the amounts I used in these songs were pretty excessive. Additionally, I was using the built-in reverb which is very digital sounding. I exclusively now use reverb pedals or vocal pedals that have good-sounding reverb built into them. The reverb on these pedals don't sound so processed as does the one built into my 16 track Boss recorder.
So not only will "Tomorrow" sound different from the EP version but "Another Morning" will as well. Not as much however. But there will be reduced levels of reverb and I'm going to remix the drum track to mono. The current version features the drums really up front in the mix due to inadvertently recording the drums onto a stereo track. After having recorded the drums I played it back and noticed that the kick drum was panned all the way to one side while the rest of the drums were panned to the other. Needless to say that was not the effect I was going for. At the time I thought the only way to remedy that (without playing the drum part all over again) would be to double the drum track and pan it all the way left or right in order to balance out everything into the middle. But that resulted in a really in-your-face drum part. So I'm going to mix down that drum track into mono and take it from there.
In other news, I'm still working on the lyrics for the final song on the album. Stayed tuned.
This is the first recording I made that I actually was pleased with the overall sound and balance of instrument mix. Even to this day I can listen to it and feel that the sound quality is pretty high. One of the measures for me of how good the quality of a recording is is the sound of the drums. In this song, the drums sound very good, from the snare to the bass to the toms to the cymbals. A badly recorded drum set sound can turn a great song into something pretty awful. I don't remember how many mic's I used to record the drums. Seeing how this is another one of the songs I recorded on the Boss BR-8 it is very possible that I only used 2 mics. The BR-8 has a 2 mic input capability and unless I used a mixer which would allow a greater number of mic's to be used (which I really doubt), that's all it was. It's not impossible to get a very good drum set sound with only 2 mics. I can to this day get a pretty solid recording of drums with only 2 mics as long as the drums are tuned well. I recorded this song sometime around 2002 and the drum sound still impresses me. To be honest, I'm pleased with all the instrument tracks. The vocal tracks needed some more work.
So this song was my second attempt at a gospel song. I called it "Thank You (For Loving Me)." I do believe this one was a lot better than "God of Love and Peace" in every way. It definitely showed progress on many levels. And it didn't sound country. Well, maybe still a little. But I blame that on the vocals. I don't think any of the instrumentation or guitar playing sounds country.
The guitar solo in this song is quite different from the solo in "God of Love & Peace." It's clean and loaded with reverb and delay. The electric guitar used for most if not the entire song was an Ibanez Artcore AF75 hollowbody guitar, which I no longer have. Here is a photo of it:
The instrument tracks include: a couple of electric guitar tracks; an acoustic guitar; electric bass; drums; electronic keyboard (organ sound); tambourine; and some vocal tracks.
This song placed in the top 1500 and won an honorable mention in the 12th Annual Billboard World Songwriting Contest.
I had created a few musical pieces/videos for the Halloween season. Here is the first of three I made and my personal favourite. It includes my own original music and a 'scary' video. I have always felt that atmosphere makes for scariness, and that 'gross' is not equivalent to 'creepy.'
It is 2 days shy of 3 years that I have uploaded this video to YouTube. And 1001 views in that amount of time. Nothing to write home about, but the fact that something original I made received that many views is pretty cool. So here is the video. Check it out and let me know what you think.
The music comes from the ending of one of my songs called "Erie's Song." I created the recording of the song to have an overall scary, lonely, dark, somber, unsettling, uneasy vibe to it. This particular part of the song features a sampled, heavily reverbed piano loop playing forwards and backwards along with some trailing reverb-heavy vocal and bowed acoustic bass.
